HARROW, IF I’D BEEN thinking straight, I would have finished off the Lyctor; she was totally incapacitated, and she’d tried to kill you once already. Instead I took us out into the steaming corridor—the place was filling up with smoke or steam, and the alarms were going off like crazy, and I couldn’t see any sign of wherever Cytherea had gone. I picked a direction, and I set off down another hallway. The one I went down had a trail of dead bees, their skulls staring upward, green goo sprayed in big webs along the hallways—took out one living bee myself, but it was pulling itself down the corridor with a couple of skewer holes in its abdomen already, so I couldn’t really add it to my count. I came to a big dim open room: high ceilings, a huge table pushed to one side and wrapped up in tarps.

There were dead Heralds everywhere. It was a fuckshow of curled-in toes and creepy human hands. The floor was seething with slime and bones. Completely gross and bad. You would’ve loved it.

Past the huge field of revenant space wasps, in the stinking dark, there was a kitchen area with another few dead bees. A green-stained white robe had been discarded at the threshold, and standing on one of the countertops—

I didn’t recognise her at first. The last time I’d seen her, she had been flat on her ass, screaming after an impromptu divorce between her arm and her shoulder. It looked at first like she was wearing some kind of metal glove from the right shoulder down, but the light from the hallway moved over the long, dark-gold skin of the humerus, joint sliding soundlessly as the twin forearm bones moved, the rapier grasped in bony fingers closing over an ugly wad of fat where the palm should have been. Her hair and skin were colourless; that pallid face brightened to see me.

“Harry,” she said. Harrow, she was genuinely delighted to see you. The smile on that thin white face was real. “Harry, you’re—”

I moved closer and totally fucking ruined her day.

“Alive, bitch,” I said.

That expression hardened like it had been dropped in quick-set concrete. In the gloom, her face was a pale floating blotch with shadowed features: I couldn’t imagine the eyes, but I knew they wouldn’t be hers. She had long since ascended to the rank of double douchebag. Ianthe flicked a lock of goo-stained hair over her shoulder, leaned against the kitchen wall, and said: “Oh—you.”